Desk Duty, Miner's Cabins and Old Dresses
by kate10011
Summary: A different take on how Erin might manage her career while pregnant with Halstead Jr. And how Camille Voight is responsible for it.
**Desk Duty, Miner's Cabins and Old Dresses**

Jay laughed when she first brought it up, of course that was back when all of it was just some quite conversations over dinner and an agreement to cancel a previously scheduled trip to the doctor's office. Not one person in the Intelligence Unit actually believed Erin would voluntarily take herself out of the field, not without ultimatums and screaming matches with Jay and Voight. (Actually, the rest of the team was looking forward to seeing Voight and Jay on the same side for once.) But to everyone's surprise, including partially her own, the moment Erin finds out about the baby growing inside her is the moment she has officially parked herself behind a desk.

Erin knows what its like to have a mother that is incapable of putting their child's needs before her own. Her whole childhood consisted of episode after episode of Bunny deciding her needs, her addictions, were more important than her children's needs. So the first thing that Erin does for her child is put their needs before her own. Their child needs to grow and develop inside her without the risk of some criminal assaulting her or shooting her. Jay insists that she can be protected in the field, but their unit seems to end up at Chicago Med more than every other unit in the City combined.

She has a love-hate relationship with desk duty. Some days it's great, without setting foot out of the office, she manages to get more done than the rest of the unit achieves running all over Chicago. Other days, she spends hours going over the same information and evidence knowing that there's nothing helpful they hadn't already seen.

Her pregnancy progress, slowly. In the first few months, her lack of a defined baby bump is frustrating for her and she suspects Jay as well. Not that Jay has done any complaining, no matter how frustrating and demanding she has been. Not with her abrupt mood swings, weird midnight cravings and endless moaning about her morning sickness and assorted unpleasant pregnancy symptoms. Jay has been the perfect husband, patient, kind, and he hasn't snapped at her once, not even the numerous times she's deserved it.

At six months pregnant, the hardest part of being out of the field is the waiting. It takes an hour or more from when the cars leave the roll-up to news coming back to them. Erin honestly doesn't know how Mouse has managed all these years, the waiting, the worrying, the endless anxiety that something might happen and you're waiting on a phone call instead of being out in front of the action. So far, she hasn't found a way to distract herself in the same way that Mouse can, immersing himself in coding and techno-whatever that only he can make sense of. She's tried taking a walk, eating lunch, going over case files, cleaning the office, hell she even tried mediating, but nothing works. Even with the knowledge that Jay is infinitely more trained for whatever the situation than any member of their unit, she still can't shake the nagging feeling that any second the phone is going to ring and she'll be told to get herself to Chicago Med, before its too late, to say goodbye to her husband. Of course she worries about the rest of the team as well, but in her nightmares it's always Jay laying on a cold metal table.

They finally get a few rostered days off in a row mid-way through the seventh month of her pregnancy. The week in the lead up to those few days in tense, as the whole unit anticipated the proverbial shit to hit the fan; but when 5pm on Thursday comes, Voight orders them out of the office and locks the door. Each member of the Intelligence Unit quickly scurries off home to their families, breathing a sigh of relief at actually getting a few days of R&R. Jay and Erin head off for Wisconsin immediately. Despite her initial reluctance to visit the old miners cabin, Erin has grown to love the place almost as much as Jay. The cabin itself had been extensively renovated, first by Jay's grandfathers, who added several extra bedrooms and amenities, and then by Jay, who updated the facilities and built the back porch and the dock by the lake. Erin's favourite feature though was the lack of cell phone coverage. The only connection to the outside world they had was the old landline phone, which only Will and Voight had the number to. When they got a few days, even weeks off, it was the first place they went.

They'd made it to the cabin just in time, no sooner had they unpacked the few bags they'd brought with them and the groceries they'd picked up along the way, a thunder storm rolled in and the sound of rain on the tin roof filled the cabin. Growing up in squalid apartment buildings, Erin had never heard the rain beat against the tin roof before she'd come here, but now it was one of her favourite sounds in the world. It reminded her of long, lazy days of just her and Jay, laying on the living room floor, watching movies and talking quietly, completely separated from the outside world. She was reminded of one particular time when the rain had almost lulled her to sleep, and Jay had rolled over onto his side, his face hoovering above hers. He'd told her how much he loved her, and the kind of future he imagined them happening, with a house they always meant to improve but never found the time, a dog that misbehaved on one of them but was perfect for the other, and babies, lots of babies. Then he'd placed a ring box in her hands, and asked if she wanted that future too.

"You better not go into labour on me this weekend Er" Jay threw out casually, interrupting Erin from her daydream. "You okay over there?"

Erin realised she was standing in the middle of the living room, obviously too lost in her thoughts. "We're just hungry" she grinned, rubbing her hands over her swollen belly for good measure.

Jay laughed, heading back towards the kitchen, "What does my baby want for dinner?"

"I'm feeling like pasta" Erin stated following Jay into the kitchen and leaning against the counter.

"I wasn't asking about want you wanted" Jay shot back, "What does the baby want?"

"Pasta" Erin replied, not missing a beat, she'd been enjoying getting her way all the time by telling Jay the baby wanted this and that, he'd never say no. "The kind with the cream and the pesto."

"Really?" He questioned wrapping his arms around his wife, "Why does that sound like something Mama wants instead?"

"I'm carrying your baby Halstead" Erin shot, now she was pulling out the big guns, next she was going to have to either cry or beg.

"Fair enough" Jay acquiesced.

Jay went to pull away from their embrace, but an insistent tug on his shirt and a raised eyebrow was enough to tell him what she wanted. Slowly, he lent down to kiss her gently, one hand on her cheek, the other drawing soft circles on the side of her bump.

The rain didn't let up the following day, but at her advanced state of pregnancy, Jay didn't want her laying on the floor all day. So instead he dragged the mattress down from their bedroom and rearranged the living room to place them between the fire and the TV. Their movie had finished a while ago, but neither wanted to leave the warm covers to put another one on. Instead they were cuddled together, kissing and talking softly.

"I didn't really believe you'd ride a desk voluntarily" Jay admitted when she'd admitted she didn't expect to feel so connected to their baby already, "I thought I'd end up begging you to leave the field and have to sleep on Will's couch until you forgave me for trying to tell you what to do."

Erin laughed quietly, she and Jay had their fair share of fights, some of them small and easily forgotten, some of them big, angry, screaming matches, where one of them had ended up storming up, or being kicked out, of their house and sleeping on someone's couch. The worst of their fights had always been when Jay tried to tell her what she should do, or when he pushed too far into her past without invitation.

"Bunny never put me first, me or Teddy" Erin explained quietly, "It was always about her, the whole time I was growing up. Until Camille, I didn't know what it was like, to have a mother that gave things up for you."

"One day, I came home from school, and Camille was waiting in the living room, with this dress. Brand new, from a department store in the city, I didn't appreciate it at the time. But the next week, she didn't go to a dinner with her friends from high school, she'd been talking about it for months. A fancy dinner they planned at this restaurant, a really expensive place. I didn't find out until later, she couldn't afford to go, because of the dress. I didn't know what to say to her, because no one had ever given anything up for me like that. Nothing important, not without demanding something in return."

"I want our baby to know I'll give up anything for them" Erin finished, "I want our baby to know that they'll always be first to me."


End file.
